Alexis Taylor Quotes
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It's funny, I played a social gig once - we were playing music that was rhythm based, but it was going in some strange places. Some people came up to me afterward and said, "Can you play a tune that we'll all recognize?" I've carried that with me forever - why would you want a tune you could recognize? What's the point of that?
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When bands are on stage and they ask the crowd, "Are you having a good time?" what they're really saying is, "I just want a bit of reassurance - is everything all right?"
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I was listening to a lot more folk music. I love the sound of acoustic guitars but I didn't want to be that person standing up there strumming away.
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When you're making the record, you're not thinking about an audience, but you still need them and you want them.
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I like listening to music on a Discman, where the CD spins, and the fact that it's weird to listen to something on a Discman when most people have an iPod, even though those have an internal hard drive that's spinning, too.
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Starting out, I remember being on the same bill with other bands, and I always thought they were so much better because they were rehearsed and had all their moves down and they sounded really tight.
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When a band first comes along, they should be confusing and doing something people don't accept. You don't want the first reaction to just be, "Oh, I get that."
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To stop for years and then discover that the audience is getting smaller and smaller would be demoralizing.
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I don't love CDs more than anything else, but I was just playing around with the idea that they could be something you're momentarily keeping hold of as everything is passing by.
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I find it really disappointing and cheap when someone's copied the whole drum sound from a record.
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There is no decision to be more or less comic. I don't feel more or less humorous in my day-to-day. These things are accidental.
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In the recording process, sometimes people feel that there isn't a space for them to contribute.
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I like the fact that everyone is nostalgic for vinyl, and I'm being nostalgic for CDs, which are like the new outdated things that no one is going to mourn the loss of - everyone's already written them off.
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I really enjoy playing for hours and hours. DJ sets where you turn up over an hour and you're on a festival stage, people basically expect much more pounding than I ever would play. I just feel like a fish out of water when I do those. They want something really kind of aggressive; that's not really the kind of music that I'm into.
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I think being a DJ is that thing of learning what makes a crowd move. As a DJ, you're constantly learning. It's like chess or something. After a couple of years, you think you're good, then you see a real DJ that's been doing it for 20 years and they just blow you away. I think that's one of the things I like about DJing: you can get better and better and better.
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It's an example of when three people think something's brilliant and one thinks it's terrible. I suppose that's what improvising can be like because you just don't really know how anyone's feeling about it. You come off stage like, "Was that good?"
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Some people are better at seeing things through to a logical conclusion as far as copying things they like from other people's records; they understand what Brian Eno did and they just do it.
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For me, the audience is the most important thing in the whole chain, so finding out how they respond to things is a learning curve at all times.
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I've always found it interesting when I'm the person in the audience feeling mismatched by what I've seen or heard. The shows I've taken the most from I may have not liked while I was there listening to it but, maybe an hour later, there's suddenly a lightening bolt out of the blue: "Oh, I'd see them again."
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It's not like that because the improvisation makes it automatically democratic. No one's leading anything. I didn't have to worry about anyone feeling involved. It was just the most natural, easy process of making music.
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I know that I can't ever write a song that just sounds completely saccharin. Even if I'm singing about someone being my complete love life, I'm singing about my own inabilities to be as bright as that person.
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You're trying to make music, and then at the end of it you give reasons for everything.
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A lot of people in the crowd want to be told what to do; if you just put your hands up, they do it.
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When I first started doing stuff outside of Hot Chip, I got the impression that Joe Goddard was a bit concerned. But I said, "I really want to record these songs quickly and not turn them into dance music." And he was fairly supportive - maybe not wholly supportive. But then you learn that no one's about to quit the band, so it seems good and healthy.
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There's another thing that you don't want to take for granted, and that's the reality of there being an audience there each night. It's pretty amazing that that can happen around the world.
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That happens quite a lot in Hot Chip - you can let go of something that was originally essential to the creation of a song.
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I'll also listen to music on a Discman and realize how nice it can sound when it's not compressed to MP3 format.
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If you can do something that doesn't rely on a major melody but still sounds immediate rather than being obtuse and devoid of anything to catch onto, that's great.
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I'm quite interested in what words can be, if it's very few words, and it's a kind of club track but it has a sort of uplifting or spiritual kind of feeling to it. Somehow, something bigger than just the words on the page happens when you hear it all together. Sometimes I notice when I'm DJing, I put on a lot of tracks that feature vocals. I guess for me, it's just from growing up loving songs, so maybe I'm geared slightly more towards dance music that features a song element.
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We're still making Hot Chip records whilst doing these other things, so why not just try and make music you enjoy making rather than being tied down by things? It would just be crazy to not allow people to make music.
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